A Spectator's Notebook
THE MOST REMARKABLE piece of double-think I have seen re- cently is in the current issue of Fact, which styles itself a monthly Socialist digest. The strike in the motor industry, it asserts, 'ended, thanks to trade union solidarity, in a crushing defeat for the employers.' So the decision of half the union members to become blacklegs is hailed as a manifestation of unity; and the payment of a few pounds compensation money by the employers (a gesture to public opinion rather than to the unions) as a trade union triumph ! The extraordinary thing is that there are union members who believe such drivel : the Communists, because they are told what to think; and the traditionalists, because they are incapable of thinking. And the worst of it is, these are precisely the people who are likely to form the majority of delegates at next week's Trades Union Congress in Brighton. I have an idea that this congress, the eighty-eighth, may turn out to be decisive. If the TUC accepts the militant policy which is being urgea on it—if, that is to say, it continues to place its faith in a Boer War type of strategy —the chances of the trade union movement surviving the next twelve months without humiliation are negligible.
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